The Teenage Syndrome

The sad passing of Henry Granju, a boy that I recently came to know through his mothers words, got me thinking about my own very turbulent teenage years. I was raised by wonderful parents, I mean truly amazing people. My father, the son of poor folks and my mother, the daughter of even poorer folks.

Dad is probably as close to Jesus as I have seen. (BTW, I am not a religious person looking for ways to compare biblical characters to my life.) Anyone reading this who knows him will most likely attest to this fact. For a man of his status, his humility is hard to wrap your mind around. I once heard someone who worked for my dad say that if he sat next to him in a dingy bar in the worst part of town, he would NEVER know that my dad was, what he is.

My mother, The Beautiful Warrior, is the strongest woman I know. As a survivor of childhood abuse, she spent most of her life healing. Luckily she found writing early on to express herself. The pain that she faced was incomprehensible by most and as she reminds me, "she would never want me to know." She faced her pain head on, with not a single vice, and without perpetuating the abuse. She is the most loving kind of human, with a heart that is arguably too big. As for her spirit, it is the most free, for better or worse.

Together they are an odd couple. Their physical differences alone, with almost a foot of height between them. They are the manifestation of ying and yang, complementary opposites within a greater whole.

As for me, I was a good kid who got mixed up with other good kids who did bad things. Does that make sense? Sadly, I think it often does. I did not come from a bad family or live in a bad neighborhood, and I certainly was a wanted child. I was experiencing what I like to call teenage syndrome, a temporary disease caused by a rapid stage of physical and mental development. One of the symptoms of a teenager is thinking they know everything and worse thinking they know how to handle everything themselves. Add an intelligent mind, and trouble is inevitable. (I often tell my husband's 14 year old sister that she should assume that she is under the control of a syndrome that makes her think she is smarter than she really is. It seems to make sense for her to understand that her judgement is temporarily impaired by the syndrome and therefore she has to revert to what us adults tell her. I explain that by truly grasping that concept she is a head above the rest.)

Couple all of that with parents who believe that their children are "just being teenagers," assuming that experimentation is normal and will not lead to anything more. Or the parents that feel guilty because they "used to do it," or still do for that matter. Then we have the parents who live by the motto "Ignorance is Bliss," wearing blinders usually without even knowing it and mostly because they can not handle it.

My teenage behavior could have had some serious consequences and sometimes it did. I was lucky to have a brother who turned me in; took the blinders off my parents weary eyes. For me it was not too late, I was able to make a change. But for others, especially those with predisposition to addiction or mental illness, there can be a point of no return.

The temptation to be a cool parent is a hard one to fight. But we must protect our children from their owns selves during this very critical transition period from child to adult.

Having said that, it is hard to know exactly how much control we should have over our kids.

My blogging comrade Galit wrote these wise words, "But in parenting, hand-in-hand with love, is control. In the form of responsibility, accountability and consequences. And that should start when kids are little. You can’t go for a decade all lovey-dovey and then suddenly come down with with all of those -itys. You know what’s right. You know what choices are okay with you. And you also know why."

One thing I do know is that I will work to lessen my judgements of others. Katie Granju lost her son, and there was certainly no lack of love or good parenting.